


Ctrl Shift Escape

by Ias



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post canon, Rites of Passage, Tumblr: jaegercon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:14:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aftermaths are the worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ctrl Shift Escape

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Jaegercon Bingo's "LOCCENT" square, and Trope Bingo's "Rite of Passage" square.

Everyone’s world ends at least once. People lose their health or their jobs or their loved ones, or are attacked by alien behemoths from another dimension. You know how it goes. But calamities are easy enough—all you have to do is let them happen. It’s the aftermath where things get sticky, when you have to step over the fragments of your old life and walk into the unknown. Doing that once was more than enough for Tendo Choi. And now he, and everyone else on the planet, was going to have to do it again.

He stood in the doorway to the LOCCENT control room and watched the team of workers gut it. There were no more Kaiju to fight and no more Jaegers to fight them, meaning every piece of technology in the Shatterdome was now a) obsolete and b) potentially dangerous to anyone unsavory who might get their hands on it. Global cooperation could only last so long.

You could still smell the sweat and coffee from the long nights monitoring the breach, like this place had developed its own atmosphere of paranoia. Tendo had been in a few different com centers and they all smelled the same. Tendo took a deep breath. This was his natural habitat.

The fact was that they had destroyed the world at the same time they were saving it. Because that was the point, wasn’t it? He’d built his life in San Francisco, and Trespasser had swept that clean. He’d built a new life in LOCCENT and well, the rest was history.

Saving the world was one thing. Now they had to figure out what to do with it.

Workers moved in and out of the com center, dismantling the equipment and hauling it out in chunks. The whole scene looked sort of like a time-lapse film of maggots stripping a carcass bare. Tendo would love to have that tape. Watch as the former last hope of humanity is disintegrated, piece by piece. Reverse it to watch Tendo’s life reconstruct itself from disembodied circuits.

The workers moved around him, shooting him the occasional glare when he got in the way, but Tendo had no plans of moving. The comwas practically a hollowed-out husk by now, and soon it would be an empty room. Tendo had earned the right to watch her go.

“That’s a cable router,” he said conversationally to someone hauling out a piece of the console’s entrails. “Trafficked the whole damn communication system. Jaeger pilots would be flying blind without it.”

“Right,” the worker said as she dumped it into a waiting cardboard box.

“That piece of junk helped save the world!” Tendo called out after her. She didn’t seem to hear.

At this point the only stuff left in the room was anything bolted down. First they had taken the monitors, packing them away in boxes full of bubble wrap and padding before rolling them out the door. Next they ripped all the cables out of the consoles, disconnecting cords that, just two weeks ago, would have meant the brain-death of every pilot currently in deployment. The cords went into big bins coiled like snakes, sprouting little identification tabs that would probably never be read again. The consoles followed shortly after, carted out without any labels or packing. Tendo had no idea what they planned to do with those, but he was sure the answer would break his heart. He’d been through the same thing at Anchorage, but that time they’d been at the end. This was a new beginning, or something equally poetic. Tendo loved poetry, but watching his home be dissected wasn’t really stirring his muse. Though maybe something spoken word: like, “fuck this, fuck you, I’m going to shackle myself to my console before you bastards rip her heart out.”

Like someone was tapping into his thoughts, the intercom stuttered out a long, mournful beep. Lunch break. The workers set down their wrenches and pliers and filed out of the room, chatting and slapping each other on the back as they went. Everyone had been remarkably happy these past few weeks, although Tendo supposed it wasn’t all that remarkable. For them, tearing down the Shatterdome was bidding a final farewell to a life defined by its opposite. Closure, of some kind. Tendo envied them. He’d never been very good at letting things go.

It’s not like he regretted that they had stopped the annihilation of their species and destroyed all the Kaiju. That was more Newt’s department.

He stepped into the now-empty control room, trailing his fingers over empty desks and letting his memories drag him back. There he had sat when Cherno drowned. Here he stood when the breach collapsed. Some people got detached in this line of work, distilling human lives into numerical values that occasionally went to zero. You never had to see any of it—it was all in the numbers. Tendo never got that way. Every time the life signals dropped to zero was another hour he’d lie away each night. He wondered if he’ll sleep better now knowing that they died for a reason. It never was that simple.

What they did here had really meant something. It might not have been a great life: the food was shit, though better than most, the hours were insane and the stress was enough to give you a full head of greys by the time you turned thirty-five. But for all that, it had been important. Not everyone got to feel like a hero, and Tendo wasn’t good at the whole “humility” thing; he was a big damn hero, just like everyone else in the Shatterdome. So what was a hero supposed to do when all the monsters had been vaporized? Go back to the San Francisco Ferry with some pretty unbelievable stories to tell?

He had never thought about what would happen when the Kaiju threat was neutralized. Like so many other people, he hadn’t let himself consider the possibility that there ever would be an end. He had built his life on the bedrock knowledge that this was all he’d ever know, only to discover he was standing on sand. At some point he had stopped believing in real life. Now real life was all he had left.

Empirically, he knew he’d be alright. The benefits he was going to get were insane, so he’d be okay financially. There were places for a man like him to go. He could move on. He wanted to move on. All that was left was to stop probing the broken pieces and take the first step forward.

His meandering path around the desolate com stopped in front of his old workstation. It was no different from any of the others; holes in the metal where they took out the computer screens, keyboard welded down to stop it from flying across the room and decapitating someone if the Kaiju came knocking. Most things were bolted down around here; maybe the constant preparations for an attack weren’t optimistic, but who’d had time for happy thoughts back then? He was still getting used to them now.

They’d already removed his chair, so he pressed his palms to the metal of his desk and leaned forward with a sigh. The keys on his keyboard had been replaced multiple times as the lettering wore away over the years.  He gave them a tap. Nothing happened. He wasn’t transported back into a world where everything made its own kind of desolate sense, and the future didn’t matter because in a day it might not exist. And yep, that was definitely nostalgia rearing its self-pitying head. Yearning for the monster days. He should really buy Newt a beer.

His fingers still rested on the edge of the counter. After a moment, he trailed them over the keyboard. The last key he had ever pressed—escape, appropriately enough—glared back up at him. The last thing he had ever done while rooted in his old life was to push down that little piece of plastic. When you looked at it that way, it seemed so insignificant.

He pulled it off the keyboard and slipped it into his pocket. He could probably go to jail for that, this being possibly the most valuable multi-government facility in human history—but it was a symbolic gesture and Tendo was a sucker for that stuff.

This time when he left the com he didn’t linger in the door. He’s not one for goodbyes either. Ahead of him the hallway wound into the bowels of the facility, and though he’s walked this way what must be a thousand times, this time he was stepping towards something new. Sure, he had no idea where the hell he was going, but if the apocalypse hadn’t turned out so bad, well. Maybe there was hope for him yet.

 The old LOCCENT room seemed to fall away behind him, but the plastic square in his pocket held his feet to the ground. Some fragments were meant to be carried with you.

 

 

 


End file.
